Will this kill my laptop

[shawn3090]

So I recently bought a Thinkpad T510 with nVIDIA NVS 3100M (sadly this month they introduced Optimus - one month too late :() and I cannot find how to turn off the graphics card. My core i7 620m is supposed to have intel hd graphics built into it, so theoretically I should be able to switch between the two (not like switchable graphics but at least in BIOS or something). The only thing I found that might work is going into device manager and hitting the disable button for my graphics card. However, I am afraid this will not enable Intel HD and kill my screen forever (seeing as you can't turn it back on without seeing the screen)

[Corvus]

Short answer: It most likely will not work, though you may be able to revert the drivers in safemode but I suggest not trying.

 

Long answer: It most likely will not work, though you may be able to revert the drivers in safemode I suggest not trying. As unlike a desktop where the motherboard and graphics cards each have their own output or the motherboard is not designed to fit in a small compact area it is possible for it to output from more than one device using the same motherboard and will almost always support using different graphics cards. With laptops it is a whole different matter as the entire design of the computer is to reduce its size, which partially involves removing as much unneeded stuff as possible unless its included as a feature, which I assume would involve only connecting the graphics chip but not the processor's graphic capabilities. If this was not the case and all such computers had the ability to switch between graphic chips, it would be logical for them to enable it on all models (when comparing 2 items at roughly the same price and main specifications, people usually take the one with more features even if they will never use them) , unless they were colluding with every other manufacturer to sell a worthless upgrade which would almost certainly not work (essentially the principle of RS merchanting clans and the problems they tend to face).

 

 

On a side note about my last statement: Yes, manufacturers will commonly sell parts with arbitrary limits put in place for a lower price, such as what happens with processors. However this is commonly for the completely seperate reason that these lower priced items are used to dispose of defective components while getting money from them, and their manufacturing proccess usually will not make enough defective items to cover the demand, resulting in limiting the good parts to fill the demand and make it harder to tell if its a good part (otherwise people would just buy alot of the bad parts and sort out all the actual good ones and sell them for a profit, and physically altering the hardware to make prevously good parts operate as bad parts is not very efficient. Besides, if people do try cheating the system and buy multiple defective parts to try getting a good item, the manufacturer actually makes more money.)